


Punchline

by calathea



Category: Macdonald Hall - Korman
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:57:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calathea/pseuds/calathea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Boots sometimes thinks his life so far sounds like the opening of a joke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Punchline

**Author's Note:**

> Betas by reginagiraffe and cincodemaygirl

Boots sometimes thinks his life so far sounds like the opening of a joke:

_A boy walks into a dormitory room in a boarding school in Canada._

"I'm Bruno. What's your name?" asks his new roommate, staring at him with an expression that might be hate or indigestion.

"Melvin O'Neal," the first boy says. "My friends call me Boots." And then no one says anything for a while.

"I'll call you Boots, too, then," says Bruno, finally.

Boots is still waiting for the punch line, unless maybe his whole life since then is the punch line, and somewhere an invisible omniscient deity is laughing and laughing and laughing.

*.*.*.*.*.*

Boots has told himself approximately 2,485,702,105 times in the last few months that at some point Bruno is bound to get a girlfriend, because on the mental graph Boots doesn't keep of how and when Bruno wastes water there has been a new trajectory lately that couldn't be explained by the predictable vagaries of boarding school plumbing or Sydney's erratic need to scrub himself down with harsh soap and pumice. Boots would deny it if he could, but he knows exactly how much time Bruno spends on personal hygiene in the morning and Bruno's shower time has tripled.

He tries to imagine her sometimes, the girlfriend that Bruno will eventually have, but he can't guess at what she'll look like, or act like, or what he is supposed to say when he meets her for the first time. He's been thinking about it for months, and he still doesn't have an opening line that isn't 'I suppose you're the reason I've been taking cold showers since September'. Boots wishes he had never thought about it at all, because now he's brought that phrase into existence it seems to hover on his tongue just waiting to humiliate him by spilling out of his mouth one day.

Boots doesn't like to admit, even to himself, that he reads the pattern of their lives in the configuration of the drifts of laundry in their room and the piles of papers on Bruno's desk, the way old ladies might read tea-leaves. He has learned, though, that a preponderance of striped shirts in the heap in the corner by the bookshelves is a certain omen of impending doom, and that if an English literature textbook is uppermost in the books on the right hand side of the desk, he should expect Bruno to wake him up three in the morning with some kind of crisis, from which Bruno will have entirely recovered by ten o'clock the next day but which will keep Boots awake at odd intervals for weeks.

For all his expertise with domestic runes, though, it's still a surprise when Cathy arrives in the ballroom at the MacDonald Hall and Miss Scrimmage's School Valentine's Ball with Joseph Kelly from Dormitory One. Amid all their talk about the dance, Diane, who'd agreed to be his date, had omitted to mention that the loose arrangement (arrived at after the never-to-be-forgotten horror of their first Valentine's ball) that some combination of Bruno, Boots, Cathy and Diane would attend together had been broken. For a moment, Boots freezes, hastily trying to recall the broken bits of politeness he had collected in some corner of his brain for the day he meets Bruno's girlfriend. All of his certainties disappear with alarming speed when Bruno actually arrives.

The dance is _supposed_ to be chaos, fuelled by the explosive combination of Cathy and Bruno in officially sanctioned tandem. It is _supposed_ to be fun, even if it leads ultimately to Boots having dishpan hands from too much punishment potato peeling. It is supposed to be what every formal dance Boots has attended since he first walked into dorm room 306 has been. It is not supposed to start with Bruno prowling up to their table alone, terrifyingly adult and suave, taking the seat next to Boots and throwing an arm around the back of Boots' chair.

Boots, who thought he had been prepared for anything, up to and including a riot following Bruno and Cathy's threatened interpretive dance to _Sexy Back_, finds himself unequal to following the conversation that follows. He can't seem to find a thing to say that isn't to Bruno or about Bruno, and he wonders if maybe he's been kidding himself all along thinking he isn't a twelve-year-old girl. Whenever he meets Bruno's eyes, Bruno smiles at him, encouraging and dangerous, and Boots has to look away again hastily. He takes only the smallest comfort in the fact that Joseph Kelly, in his seat across the table, is bemused by the Cathy and Diane double-act, and is presumably past noticing Boots' plight.

When the dinner part of the evening is finally over and Diane drags him off to dance and hisses at him to tell her what's wrong, he just shrugs. Diane has promised that, as his date (even if in name only), she won't laugh at his dancing or the clothes his mother sent him to wear, but he hadn't known to forbid her from laughing at him about Bruno.

The thing is, Boots has been the person who picks up the towels that Bruno likes to leave all over the bathroom, and who wakes Bruno up when he has the nightmare about the mice and the spaceship, and who listens to Bruno at three in the morning when he's worried about the rainforests. Boots reads Bruno's life in the order that Bruno plays CDs, and he isn't sure he's ready for Bruno to be watching him dance, silent and badly lit, with half a smile on his lips.

*.*.*.*.*.*

When Bruno tells people the story of the first time they met, he makes it sound like he and Boots were Best Friends Forever from the very first day at school, but of course that isn't anything like the truth (even if Boots would like it to be). Boots knows that at first they were polite, annoyed, and distant with one another in the strangeness of their room, though he doesn't remember now how long it lasted. It's hard to remember anything from before Bruno – his presence in Boots' life bleeds back into places Bruno himself has never been, until he's surprised to find when he goes home that he has friends who have never met Bruno (and usually don't want to, after Boots has described him).

Boots wonders sometimes if whoever had been Bruno's roommate would have been his best friend, would have been Bruno's Boots. Boots can't imagine being at school without Bruno, and even though he has other friends, it's like Bruno is his default setting. But of the two of them, Bruno is the more outgoing; Boots thinks Bruno would make friends if he were cast ashore on an island full of cannibals. At school, Bruno is the sun around which the whole of Dormitory Three orbits, and Boots thinks he is just the closest and most favoured of Bruno's many satellites.

When he comes back to the table, Cathy immediately tugs Diane's hand out of his, and they rush off, whispering, to the ladies room. Joseph, despite Cathy's instructions, almost immediately stands up and walks briskly away towards the comfort of another group from Dormitory One. As he leaves, Bruno puts his arm around the back of Boots' chair again and asks what Boots is thinking about. Boots doesn't know how to tell him that gravity has shifted, so he just smiles and says he's wondering if Joe Kelly will survive the night. Bruno looks at their terrified classmate, waving his arms around in violent gestures at his dorm-mates, and laughs as well.

When the girls come back, Diane looks at Bruno, loose-limbed and comfortable in his chair, his arm unselfconsciously around Boots' shoulders, and Boots knows she is regretting her promise not to mock him too much. He is pretty certain nothing good will come of it when she finally pulls Bruno up and onto the dance floor.

It's Boots' turn now to watch while Bruno dances, and though he's smiling he's wondering if he's going to be flung out into open orbit or spin dizzily closer before the night is over.

*.*.*.*.*.*

Boots had grown up expecting to go to MacDonald Hall, the way most of the boys in Dormitory Three had. The name O'Neal twirls calligraphically over trophies and plaques and honours boards in dusty corners all over the school. There's even an M. O'Neal on the stone monument that lists the boys who moved without pause from dormitory to barracks to ranks of dead in silent battlefields. Bruno found that one, and Boots watched him run light fingers over the rain-smoothed letters. (He wasn't surprised when Bruno woke him up at four in the morning to make him promise not to go to war.)

Bruno, however, is different. He'd been to some expensive private elementary school (or more than one, Boots is never quite sure) but it doesn't seem like anyone in Bruno's family had been sent away to school before. Bruno doesn't say much about elementary school, but in every photo Boots has ever seen of him from before the Hall he looks sulky and tough, and he taught Boots once how to break out of a chokehold. Boots doesn't know what happened before MacDonald Hall and he doesn't know what happened that made Bruno decide one day that he belonged at the Hall, and the Hall belonged to him. He does know that the end result is that Bruno has woven himself into the fabric of MacDonald Hall with all the fervour of a religious convert, and in the process tangled Boots up so tightly with him that Boots isn't sure how he'll survive graduation this summer, let alone the slow unravelling of their friendship over time and distance that might one day follow.

Boots leaves the dance an hour before it's officially over, abandoning Diane to a group of cackling Scrimmettes who seem to be critiquing the appearance of every man in the room. Dormitory Three is dark and silent, and he steps over the detritus of Bruno's earlier wardrobe crisis and drops onto his back on his bed. He switches on his radio, too, and thinks about Bruno's hip swivelling performance to a pop tune sung by a blue-eyed crooner.

He lies there, half dreaming, for a quarter hour before there's a noise in the corridor. When the door creaks open he rolls up onto one elbow and clicks on the tiny bedside light he uses when he wants to read and Bruno is already asleep.

Bruno walks in, vaguely dishevelled, and smiling. He shuts the door behind him and leans back against it. After a long moment of silence, broken only by the tiny hiss of the radio, he walks across the room and clears a little space on the floor with one foot. He holds out a hand to Boots and pulls him up to his feet.

Before Boots can protest, Bruno's arms slide around him, and he's drawn into a barely there, swaying dance in the shadows of Room 306. He wants to speak, he wants to pinch himself to make sure it's real, but Bruno just hushes him and holds him a little tighter when he draws a breath.

*.*.*.*.*.*

_A boy walks into a dormitory room in a boarding school in Canada._

"I'm Bruno. What's your name?" asks his new roommate, staring at him with an expression that might be hate or indigestion.

"Melvin O'Neal," the first boy says. "My friends call me Boots." And then no one says anything for a while.

"I'll call you Boots, too, then," says Bruno, finally.

Boots has been wondering about the punch line since their story started, but he never would have guessed that it was:

_And years later they fell in love._


End file.
